Sunday, September 10, 2006

Mars and Venus: The Sting of the Spelling Bee

This may not be a Mars and Venus issue...but if I can't poke fun at myself, what's the point of my blog?

First; an admission of guilt. I am not the world's best speller.

The spell checker is one of my better friends, and the babylon on-line, pop-up, look-up, spelling applet is worth it's weight in golden technical manuals.

In ninth grade, I did reasonably well on my spelling tests, but there are still words which I forget how to spell on a constant basis.

Vacuum. Two C's? One U? Two U's? Which is it?

Surprise. "R-P-R" That doesn't always sound right.

Yes, I've memorized all the spelling algorithms; "I before E, except after C", and I know that "ghoti" can be pronounced as "fish"...

But there are times I've lost miserably to my wife when spelling words -- the most humiliating of all was then I went on and on, telling her that it's unfortunate she didn't have the advantage of growing up in the USA where we learned to properly spell in English.

We even bet on it...and I lost.

I lost, I lost, I lost.

Thankfully, my wife doesn't remind me of my humiliating defeat...which is why I was much more careful last night, when a Yiddish word came into question.

I didn't bet, nor did I make that big a performance over it...I tried to be more modest... perhaps I could be wrong.

I said, "let's find out" -- and I called my father-in-law.

Obviously, my wife was right again. (Or was I wrong again?)

However, I was relieved that I had minimized the damage by:

1. Not betting on it with my wife.2. Not dancing around the kitchen in advance of finding out the answer, saying how "I am SO going to WIN this"3. Not making any lame remarks about my superior US education (even my US college diploma wouldn't have help me with this vs. my wife's Israeli college diploma).4. Not mentioning a word to my father-in-law about the reason for my question.5. After hearing the correct spelling from my father-in-law (He's a Scrabble Champ, so we trust him on these things), instead of hemming and hawing to my wife, I turned to her, smiled and said, "You were right!"

Just like that.

So she smiled back and we were able to continue on with motzei shabbat.

Important Lessons Learned

1. If guys are going to be stupid competitive with their wives...and you win, be graceful. (otherwise, you've still lost)

2. If guys are going to be stupid competitive with their wives...try to reduce your silly performance of thinking you're going to win, so that the sting of defeat isn't as painful.

3. If your wife smiles at you after you lose, and still doesn't rub your face in your defeat (too much), then you've both won.

4. I really need to brush up on my Yiddish spelling.

If you haven't read the original Muqata posting about Mars and Venus on this blog, now is a good time to read it. Shifra wrote about how differently men and women view the Erev Shabbat 18 minutes, and it's become a JBlogosphere Muqata classic.

So what was the Yiddish word? Are there any rules of how to spell a word in Yiddish? Is there also grammar? I thought it is so depending where you´re from, the Polish Yiddish is different from the Hungarian Yiddish etc etc, not totally but the pronounciation of some words. Or am I wrong?

The woman in the house who beats me at word games is my 15 year old who now beats me in boggle regularly.My wife doesn't play word games.However for Yiddish words that have been accepted into English (or at least law see: http://www.jlaw.com/Commentary/SupremeChutzpah.html )

5. After hearing the correct spelling from my father-in-law (He's a Scrabble Champ, so we trust him on these things), instead of hemming and hawing to my wife, I turned to her, smiled and said, "You were right!"